MSFT licenses Géoportail content: Microsoft is partnering with France’s National Geographic Institute (IGN), makers of Géoportail, to license IGN’s aerial imagery for Virtual Earth. Finally, a business model for IGN that makes sense to me (although I would like it even more if public agencies made their content available in the public domain). Like I’ve said before, national mapping agencies should let MSFT and GOOG deal with the technology, and focus on the content. So doesn’t this leave Géoportail a little redundant, even with API? As a consumer, why limit your map to France when Virtual Earth gives you the same France and the world as well?

Map-off: FortiusOne’s Sean Gorman looks at the relative merits of Google’s, Microsoft’s and Yahoo’s online mapping solutions. One thing I would add: Google Maps was late to the game of providing homegrown authoring tools precisely because it was first to the game giving developers an API to build such web apps themselves.

Permalinked KML label URLs: The perpetually unsatisifed Valery Hronusov has further improved his autmatic KML labeling tool: It now provides you with direct permalinked URLs for the resulting KML labels, so you don’t first need to save them to your desktop before you can share them.